Effects of rain on satellite communication

Rain is an essential substance for human life. Most of the fresh water on earth is deposited by rain.As important as rain is, it has its negative effect on certain things. One of the negative effect if rain is that it reduces the quality of signals. Rain interferes with signals thereby, reducing their strength and quality. Thus, the reduction in the quality of electromagnetic signals by rain is called Rain attenuation.

Rain attenuation is a phenomenon we experience anytime it rains. I have experienced it in past and recent times but didn't get to know the actual name of the effect until I did my research. Most times when we watch programs from our decoders like DSTV and other and it's rainy, we notice that a message is displayed on the TV screen like"searching for signal" .This message is trying to tell us that there has been an interference with the signal. Sometimes, this problem prevails over a long time depending on how heavy the rain is at the time.

Also, rain attenuation affects communication via mobile phones. When it rains, we notice that at times our cells don't go through or it could go through but we won't hear the other person clearly. This is as a result of attenuation of the signal by rain and has green a major problem in our world.
A lot of research and experiment have been carried out by scientists on how to eradicate the problem of rain attenuation. This problem prevails over frequencies that are above 10Hz. These frequencies are called Ultra High Frequency (UHF) or Very High Frequency (VHF). Although there is no model or instrument that can eradicate rain attenuation completely, scientists have been able to come up with certain models that helps to predict rain attenuation. Among these models, the International

Telecommunication Union (ITU) is the standard model for predicting rain attenuation. The prediction of rain attenuation by this model will help engineers in charge of sattelite communication called Microwave Engineer to be able to mitigate the problem so that there's little loss of signal by rain. Although the mitigation will not totally eradicate the problem because rain is a natural phenomenon but it will reduce the loss of signal so that there is little or negligible loss of signal .